If you’re interested in the development of WordPress, you may be interested in following along during its development cycles. If you plan on contributing code to WordPress, this will help you stay more current and allow you to make more-relevant patches.

One of the more obvious ways to keep up with development is to run a copy of the in-development version (trunk) of WordPress. You can do this by doing an SVN checkout on http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/trunk/ and setting WordPress up normally. After that, you can do an SVN update to merge any updates with your local copy.

Along with running the current development version, you may want to be notified whenever something is checked in to the WordPress repository. There are multiple methods of getting these notifications. You can receive them by email, an RSS feed or Twitter.

There are also multiple mailing lists for the discussion of the development of WordPress, all of which are listed here.